The company’s OnHub router is intended to be faster, more reliable, and — most importantly — understandable.
Routers are, for many, a mystery. They're shoved behind a television or in a corner, and left alone until the precise moment your internet connection goes down. When that happens, you check the blinking green lights and if they're not blinking the way you remember them blinking last time you checked, you unplug the router, wait ten seconds, then plug the router back in. Did that work? Maybe you should cycle your modem or...
Google wants to change what's often a frustrating process, and demystify your home network.
On Tuesday morning, the company began pre-sales of OnHub, a router designed to fix the typical router/user relationship. "We realized that people were just living with Wi-Fi issues," Trond Wuellner, an OnHub Product Manager, told BuzzFeed News.
Wuellner spent eight years working on Chrome before moving to Google's hardware development division, where his team identified three problems with routers: They were badly designed, unreliable, and above all, mysterious — the average owner just didn't understand how they worked or how to fix them.
The design problem was the easiest to address; OnHub doesn't look like a typical router. It evokes products like Amazon's Echo, or Apple's AirPort Extreme, rather than something from Netgear. Developing an appealing router design was a priority. "The reason that people keep their routers on the floor" — something Wuellner says seriously limits a router's effectiveness — "is design. There are a lot of wires, routers come in ugly shapes, and with bright, blinking lights." So, Google conceived of OnHub as a rounded tower and minimized its wired connections. The company also softened its blinking lights and added an option to disable them, should the device be installed in a bedroom. The result: a router that doesn't compel its owner to stick it under a couch or inside a closet.
A view from above.
OnHub was also designed for ease of use. It can be calibrated and maintained via a smartphone app called Google On. That app uses "Insight Cards" to lay out what's going on with the router in everyday language, and offer easily understandable suggestions for optimizing its performance.
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